Last Stand
by Flidais
Summary: MA A short experience of loss.


**Last Stand **

Dark Angel; Max/Alec  
Stand-Alone. There are no explanations to be had. It is what it is.  
Rated PG  
I don't own them. 

* * *

Max was the center of a maelstrom with the world closing on her. The open space around her was pulling in, shrinking down. They were hemming her in on all sides, but they needn't have bothered. She was only interested in moving forward.

They tried to keep her from seeing, blocking her view with forms thick and thin, human and animal. Her screams of rage, fear, and heartache rose beyond the dampening press of bodies in the confines of their collective cage. She pushed and fought through them. Her limbs lashed out with inhuman speed. The satisfaction that she used to feel when her fists and feet impacted with solid meat was absent in this moment. All Max felt was exhaustion and anguish. Her skin was stained with her own blood and others'. Yet, her people stood their ground, only moving to defend themselves. A number of transgenics had already been felled by her vicious attack, but there always seemed to be others who stepped into the gaps created. Tears ran from her eyes unchecked, blurring her vision so that she was fighting blind. 

"Let her through." Joshua's voice was a growled rumble behind her. Without a sound, the sea of transgenics parted. Before her opened a clear lane to a thick latticework of bars, beyond which she could see the open grassy plane with its ominously tall wooden platform. Max rushed forward. 

Her body slammed against the bars. She didn't feel the scorching metal against her breast and palms or the merciless sun beating down on her head. An errant whisper of a breeze blew strands of hair across her face unchecked. Her every focus was solely upon the vision of Alec being led up the platform by their keepers. 

His neck was a blood-crusted ring of raw flesh where they had clamped a platinum collar around it to drag him from the corral. Marring the golden skin of his cheek was a nasty bruise that spread up to his temple. His nose was an ugly, crooked mess, and his hair matted with old blood that spoke of injuries already healed. Their keepers trained several automatic weapons on him as he was marched up the stairs. His arms were restrained behind his back at an acute angle and fastened with some sort of complicated platinum harness. His eyes were quiescent and he made no move to escape. 

Hysteria seized upon Max. "Damn it, Alec, fight! Fight!" She grabbed the bars and shook as if she had hold of the tattered lapels of his jacket and were shaking him. "Don't leave me here! Fight, damn you!" Her voice was crackling with the force of her sobs. "Please!" 

"I never could leave you, Maxie. You know that." His words were a scarcely breathed whisper beneath their enemy's declarations of judgment and condemnation, but she heard them all the same. 

Max went very still. A sense of calm seemed to wash over her as she realized that what was shining out at her from his hazel eyes wasn't sorrow, or hope, or laughter, or mischief, or regret, or longing, or even love, just some unnamed emotion that went deeper than any and all of those things. It went deeper than anything they could have said to each other over a lifetime. He gave the barest of nods once he saw that she understood him, a small smile playing on his full lips. Those full, playful lips that had given her their last sweet, strong kiss. Lips that were now cracked and bleeding. 

The executioner did not offer Alec the courtesy of a hood or even a blindfold. He did not ask Alec for last words. A braided leather noose was simply tightened about the transgenic's already abused neck. The ghost of a flinch passed over the his once handsome features. Max pressed her body further against the bars -- so hard it hurt, as if, by sheer will, she could push her molecules past the metal and close the yards of distance between herself and Alec. They fixed their attention on each other to the exclusion of all else. They paid no attention to the executioner moving to the lever that stemmed from the wooden floor of the platform. 

The void opened beneath Alec and he plummeted through. In unison, Max unknowingly sank to her knees. And the world faded to nothing. 

**FIN**


End file.
